Up to that time nothing had been said between the lovers. In Rudi’s
position it was not for him to make the first move, and the Princess was
shy and uncertain. Then the King’s letter bore its first fruits, in the
shape of a stout little gentleman “with pigs’ eyes.”
The Princess had been hastily put into a muslin dress with a pink sash
and taken in to see him, and he had talked to her for a few minutes,
appraising her all the time. She had got so nervous that she had dropped
her tea-cup. The Archduchess had scolded her frightfully about it later.
“But she did not know what it was all about,” said Clotilde. “Rudi was
in attendance and he suspected something, but we did not.”
I think Clotilde herself suspected Rudi of what followed. For going back
to the railroad, down the mountain, the big berlin carrying the King’s
envoy upset and threw the little gentleman out. There was a great to-do
about it at the castle, but the beans were spilled, so to speak, and
there was nothing to be done.
And within a day or two Rudi, who had had a bad fright, declared
himself. The English “Mees” had a bad cold and the old people were away
for the day. Rudi, it seems, simply marched up to the old schoolroom,
threw open the door and stalked in. He looked first at the Princess and
then at Clotilde.
“Will you allow me a moment alone with the Princess?” he said.
Clotilde got up, curtsied and went out. As she closed the door she heard
Rudi, still stalking apparently, cross the room and say in a loud and
desperate voice:
“If you tell me to go I shall go—by the window!”
As the window, although over a cliff, was really a sort of narrow feudal
slit for archers, and as Rudi was extremely big, there seems to have
been little danger. Anyhow, it was apparently not necessary for him to
make the attempt. When Clotilde went back, hearing no voices, she found
them in each other’s arms.
“And then?”
“I did not see much of them for a week or so. I was taken ill. But they
were very happy. Like children, not looking ahead. Just—happy.”
And she had been ill! Lying in her shabby stone-floored room, with its
tapestry over the door to keep out the draft, and picturing them
together. Having the Princess come in now and then, glorified, to talk
of Rudi. And even Rudi tiptoeing in clandestinely to press her hand and
thank her. Ill, indeed.
Nothing more had been heard of the little man with the pigs’ eyes except
a profound apology for the accident from the Duke and a rather irritable
acceptance of it. It began to look as if the King’s eyes had been turned
elsewhere for a wife, and the Duchess was most unamiable.
Then one day a photographer came to the castle and took a great many
photographs of the Princess, sitting and standing, sideways and full
face.
“She had a new frock for it,” said Clotilde. “The Archduchess’s maid
made it. It was white tulle looped with rosebuds, and they gave her the
little string of pearls she wears now. It was her first décolleté, and
she was very self-conscious. But so beautiful, my dear!”
Then things began to move rather fast. Came an Ambassadress to spend a
week-end.
“A terrible woman,” said Clotilde. “Tall and thin, in a red velvet
draped over a green plaid. Worth had just introduced the bustle and the
enormous back drapery over it, and she could only sit on the edge of a
chair.”
Well, there had been a gala dinner at four in the afternoon and a ball
that night, and the Ambassadress, always from the edge of her chair,
watched the Princess through her pince-nez.
“She dances sweetly,” she said. “Also she has manner. Very much manner,
for one so young.”
The Archduchess was extremely gratified and content, even though her own
back drapery had sunk into insignificance beside the visitor’s.
The hunt was fairly in the open now, and Rudi was almost frenzied. That
night after the ball, when Clotilde went back to her room, she found him
there, his sabre and helmet flung on her bed, and Rudi pacing the floor.
“I was greatly alarmed,” she said. “So much gossip went on in the castle
always. And then it was old and the floor boards creaked. I could hear
him long before I got to my door.”
It is a curious picture; the Ambassadress and the Archduchess being
disrobed somewhere, their partures being taken off—the Archduchess had
had one reset for the occasion—the tight Worth dresses, so heavy that
their maids could hardly lift them, being hung away, and their wearers
silently plotting, dreaming; the Princess herself, too trained to
submission to resist them all, perhaps standing at her window with the
tulle and rosebud frock flung anywhere; and Rudi in Clotilde’s room, not
caring if he roused the castle, and loudly demanding of the girl who
loved him that she help him to the girl he loved.
Of course there was no answer. Clotilde, it seems, was as ignorant of
the world and its ways as the Princess.
“We had been so sheltered,” she said in her quiet voice. “I had never
been out on a street alone in my life. And young women were not supposed
to think. A serious-minded girl had no hope of marriage in those days.
Although we had heard that”—she smiled a little—“_Après la sainte
cérémonie tout est permis_.”
She had, it seems, been rather frightened at Rudi, so hot at first, so
dogged toward the end. And he said the most frightful things about the
King at the top of his voice. “Things one does not speak about,” she
explained, “although they were probably true.”
Much of that, I gather, went over Clotilde’s head at the time, for she
and the Princess were entirely innocent. But Rudi of course was not, and
the idea of selling this pearl of his into any sort of impurity had
quite maddened him.